Spotify is notorious amongst musicians for only paying a fraction of the royalties that other online music sites pay to bands. But it’s popular with music fans for allowing them to listen to almost anything on demand. Now they are being forced to bring in new restrictions
This article titled “Spotify to halve free music allowance” was written by Josh Halliday, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 14th April 2011 09.31 UTC Spotify is to cut back the amount of free listening available to users from 20 to 10 hours.
From 1 May, the music streaming service will reduce by half the amount of free music available to its six million users in the UK and Europe.
Under the new restrictions, non-subscribers will only be allowed to listen to an individual track a maximum of five times. New users will be moved on to the restricted model within six months; it will apply to existing users from 1 May.
Since its 2008 launch, Spotify’s free offering has proved popular enough to tempt more than 1 million people to become paying customers.
Daniel Ek, Spotify’s co-founder, announced the changes in a blogpost on the company’s website on Thursday.
“Making Spotify available to millions across Europe has seen the service become incredibly popular. People are listening to more music and from a wider range of artists than ever before, and are giving up on piracy, which is exactly what we hoped would happen,” he said.
“So it’s vital that we continue offering an on-demand free service to you and millions more like you, but to make that possible we have to put some limits in place going forward.”
Ek said that the changes would mainly affect heavier users of the service, and that users would still be able to listen to around 200 tracks or 20 albums for free each month.
The move will no doubt rankle with some music fans, who had grown used to Spotify’s free streaming service being “too good to be true“.
The first commenter on Spotify’s official blogpost lamented: “So long Spotify. It was nice knowing you. Guess I’ll go back to pirating music again then.”
More details soon…
• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly “for publication”. • To get the latest media news to your desktop or mobile, follow MediaGuardian on Twitter and Facebook
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogSpotify to halve free music allowance
Related posts:Music video website Vevo to launch in the UK Pandora shuts out world wide listeners 30 new music apps for iPhone, Android and iPad
